Re: Release note trimming: another modest proposal

On 1/25/19 6:46 PM, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 25, 2019 at 06:41:20PM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> writes:
>>> I assume this means we would only keep the current release notes in the
>>> git tree too, e.g. 11.0, 11.1, 11.2, etc.
>>
>> Yeah, I'd imagine that each branch would have just its own release notes.
>>
>> I'm not sure whether to apply this policy retroactively to the supported
>> back branches or just establish it going forward.  Maintaining the notes
>> could be pretty confusing for the next few years if we do the latter,
>> though.
>
> Agreed.  We would need to backpatch.
>

I am in favor of backpatching.

The one "caveat" I will bring up is that once pushed and applied to the
site, we would bring introduce a lot of 404s into the website.

Doing some research on our traffic analytics on the past 6 months, the
only release notes that even registered in the top 500 pages visited
were the ones from whatever the newest release was (i.e. 10.4, 10.5,
11.0, 11.1). That, combined with that I don't think we will take an SEO
hit from unceremoniously removing the pages even with the sudden rise in
404s, should make it ok to backpatch.

Jonathan